Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. So the saying goes. Those whom the Gods would merely humiliate, they first render, well, a little bit off their nut. Michelle Malkin has a marvelous note on Jonathan Chait's recent mumbling in the LATimes. Chait, she reminds us, made a big splash when he defended the utter loathing of President Bush that backs up like sewer water from deep inside the contemporary liberal soul. In this latest product of bad spiritual plumbing, Chait argues that President Bush is dangerously obsessed. By retrograde religion? No. By a passion for exercise.
A week ago, when President Bush met with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III to interview him for a potential Supreme Court nomination, the conversation turned to exercise. When asked by the president of the United States how often he exercised, Wilkinson impressively responded that he runs 3 1/2 miles a day. Bush urged him to adopt more cross-training. "He warned me of impending doom," Wilkinson told the New York Times. Am I the only person who finds this disturbing?
As the irrepressible Malkin remarks, yes, Jonathan, you pretty much are. The evidence above was apparently misquoted. Bush advised Wilkinson that he was courting doom for his knees, which is a questionable but surely reasonable defense of cross training. So what else has Chait got?
Earlier this year, an airplane wandered into restricted Washington air space. Bush, we learned, was bicycling in Maryland. In 2001, a gunman fired shots at the White House. Bush was inside exercising. When planes struck the World Trade Center in 2001, Bush was reading to schoolchildren, but that morning he had gone for a long run with a reporter. Either this is a series of coincidences or Bush spends an enormous amount of time working out.
So based on these three pieces of evidence, hitherto ignored by a corrupt and unnerved press, he can assure us that "Bush has an obsession with exercise that borders on the creepy."
One of Malkin's readers shrewdly notes that, during the recent unpleasantness known as the 2004 campaign, that there was scarcely a single rich man's sport that Kerry was not photographed playing at. But never mind that. However justified Chait's loathing of Bush may be, it has distorted the trajectory of his reasoning to the point that, well, therapy seems in order.
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